Mats Heimdahl

M.S. Computer Science and Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, 1988.

Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, 1994.

Biography:

Professor Mats Heimdahl specializes in software engineering and safety critical systems. He is the director of the University of Minnesota Software Engineering Center (UMSEC).

Heimdahl is the recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER award, a McKnight Land-Grant Professorship and the McKnight Presidential Fellow award at the University of Minnesota, and the University of Minnesota Award for Outstanding Contributions to Post-Baccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education.

Research:

Software is increasingly involved in our lives; software controls physical systems ranging from microwave ovens and watches to nuclear power plants, aircraft, and cars. Computer-related failures can, in many of these applications, have catastrophic effects.

My research group, the Critical Systems Research Group (CriSys), is conducting research in software engineering and is investigating methods and tools to help us develop software with predictable behavior free from defects.

Research in this area spans all aspects of system development ranging from concept formation and requirements specification, through design and implementation, to testing and maintenance. In particular, we are currently investigating model-based software development for critical systems.

Specifically, we are focusing on how to use various static verification techniques to assure that software requirements models possess desirable properties, how to correctly generate production code from software requirements models, how to validate models, and how to effectively use the models in the testing process.

Interests:

Software engineering and safety critical systems.

Recent Publications

The oracle - an arbiter of correctness of the system under test (SUT) - is a major component of the testing process. Specifying oracles is challenging for real-time embedded systems, where small changes in time or sensor inputs may cause large differences in behavior. Behavioral models of such systems, often built for analysis and simulation, are appealing for reuse as oracles. However, these models typically provide an idealized view of the system.

Structural coverage criteria have been proposed to measure the adequacy of testing efforts. Indeed, in some domains—e.g., critical systems areas—structural coverage criteria must be satisﬁed to
achieve certiﬁcation. The advent of powerful search-based test generation tools has given us the ability to generate test inputs to satisfy
these structural coverage criteria. While tempting, recent empirical evidence indicates these tools should be used with caution, as

Model-based development (MBD) tool suites such as Simulink and Stateflow offer powerful tools for design, development, and analysis of models. These models can be used for several purposes: for code generation, for prototyping, as descriptions of an environment (plant) that will be controlled by software, as oracles for a testing process, and many other aspects of software development. In addition, a goal of model-based development is to develop reusable models that can be easily managed in a version-controlled continuous integration process.